Editor’s Note
HONG KONG, APRIL 2023Welcome to the first volume of 2023, courtesy of over 600 wonderful submissions—our largest call yet. The theme this quarter: Wayfinding, or stories that explore our relationships with physical (and metaphorical) spaces and places, how we orient ourselves, and how we navigate and find our way.
As always, I’m deeply grateful to everyone who responded to the call and shared their work with The Bureau Dispatch: thank you for trusting your words with us. Thank you, of course, to the fourteen extraordinary writers whose stories and photographs are featured in Volume 05: Wayfinding. And like many things at TBD there’s something a little meta about this call because every story and photograph we publish contributes towards our own wayfinding, towards orienting us within the literary community and charting a course forward.
Happy reading!
Warmest regards,
The Editor
HONG KONG, OCTOBER 2022First things first: thank you.
Thank you for trusting your stories with a fledgling literary journal that began nine months ago with big dreams and the idea that while we may all be writing alone, in different parts of the world, across different timezones: we tell stories together—as is evidenced by the 66 stories, 3 interviews, and countless photos and bureau inventories within these pages. As of this writing, The Bureau Dispatch receives over 3,000 visitors per month from 101 countries (!) making it one of a handful of English-language literary journals in Hong Kong and East Asia with worldwide reach. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
The first three volumes—The Bureaus, Dispatch, Dear X—established some of the recurring themes TBD will continue to mine and explore in the years ahead. With Volume 04: Field Notes, we went with an open submissions call in the hopes that the stories themselves would help shape this-year end volume. And what a haul it was—TBD received almost 600 stories within the six-week window, our biggest call yet.
One writer asked: “What does TBD look for in fiction / CNF?” It dawned on me that the way this journal is set up—with its focus as much on the writer and writing space as it is on the stories themselves—is what draws so much interest to the journal. TBD doesn’t label work as “fiction” or “creative nonfiction,” instead it presents stories as a kind of truth, direct from the bureau of the writer, and I think it is this additional layer of ambiguity that makes the stories so compelling.
In this quarter’s Correspondence, it was my privilege to write to bestselling author of Edinburgh, The Queen of the Night, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, essayist, and teacher, Alexander Chee. We discuss the distance between strangers, Alexander’s writing desks, and the importance of remaining hidden.
Finally, Volume 05 will be open for submissions from November 1, 2022 until January 31, 2023. If you have a story, I’d love to read it.
Happy reading!
Warmest regards,
The Editor
HONG KONG, JULY 2022Welcome to another volume of The Bureau Dispatch—this one marks our first fifty contributors: fifty stories, fifty inventories, fifty photographs of writers and their workspaces. When I first conceived of the idea of a journal that celebrates the working writer, I never imagined the kind of love that it would receive from the writing community. Thank you so much for your support.
In the first two volumes, we looked at the link between writer and writing; in Volume 03: Dear X we focus on epistolary writing and found things, with stories, inventories, and photographs from sixteen phenomenal writers.
Also: in this quarter’s Correspondence, I write to Matt Bell, author of the New York Times Notable Book Appleseed and craft book Refuse to Be Done. We talk about seedlings and Grandma’s apple trees; the last meals of megafauna; and growing roots and moving on.
Last but not least, Volume 04 will open for submissions on August 1st. If you have a story, I'd love to read it.
Happy reading!
Warmest regards,
The Editor
HONG KONG, MARCH 2022It's been a busy quarter. Volume 01: The Bureaus launched with a level of enthusiasm from the writing community that completely blew me away (thank you!) and when the call went out for the second volume, the submission queue promptly exploded with stories. Something about the idea of trying to capture a sense place in a medium defined by its placelessness seemed to resonate in our increasingly uncertain world.
Volume 02: Dispatch continues to examine the link between writer and writing, with short stories, excerpts, and photographs from sixteen extraordinary writers.
In these stories there is love, longing, heartbreak, and humor. We look at the notion of distances and how we bridge them: there’s the distance between characters and place—such as in Aubrey Hirsch's Among the Stars and Chloe N. Clark's The Day Lasts Longer the Further Away You Are; there’s the distance between loved ones—such as in Joy Guo's Mothers-in Law, Meg Pokrass's This is Our City, Thu Anh Nguyen's I Have to Leave So That I Can Return, and Hananh Yang's Vocabulary Lesson; there’s the distance between time and memory, such as in Cathy Ulrich's Love Songs for Ghosts, Peter Witte's Storytime?, Amy Cipolla Barne's Farm Reports, and Nick Olson's May You / Live In / Interesting Times. There are stories that are so compelling and unique that I'd insta-accepted them when they appeared in my inbox—such as Tanya Žilinskas's Two Knocks, Chin-Sun Lee's Soon You'll Be Just Like Us, Maria Haskin's The Parlor, Aaron Burch's bonus scene from Year of the Buffalo, and Chris Panatier's Internet Review from a Vampire.
I have also had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Christopher James, founder and editor of Jellyfish Review, in a quarterly series called Correspondence. We talk in detail about his bureau, and, of course, jellyfish.
Last but not least, Volume 03 will open for submissions on April 1st, with an editorial focus on epistolary stories. If you have a story, I'd love to read it.
In the mean time, happy reading!
Warmest regards,
The Editor
HONG KONG, JANUARY 2022There have been changes at home and at work, and like many of the contributors to this first volume of The Bureau Dispatch, I’ve had to find new ways (and places) to write. The dining table and the creaky IKEA desk in the study have been overrun by our kids, stranded at home (and bouncing off the walls) because school has moved online until further notice. In fact, I’m writing this letter on a plastic tray attached to the steering wheel of a car parked beside two inquisitive cats. It’s the only place I can write these days. I haven’t seen wild boars in a while, but I recently wrote about them here.
TBD began with a question: How do other writers do it?
To answer that question, I reached out to a group of amazing writers with a request: send a photograph of themselves in their writing space, an inventory of up to ten things on their desks, and a 250-word unpublished micro or excerpt of something they’re currently working on.
It has been my great privilege shaping TBD with these wonderful writers. Volume 01 feels a little like alchemy, a little bit of mad science—we don’t know what we’ll find when we combine these ingredients. But if I were to try and put it into something pithy, Volume 01 might be an exploration of the link between the writer and the act of writing; a humble attempt to bottle that fleeting sense of place through a medium defined by its placelessness.
Volume 02: Dispatch is scheduled to be published in April 2022, and will have a tighter narrative focus and longer pieces. I’m thrilled with the wildly enthusiastic response so far—if you have a story, consider submitting it here.
Finally, it is my hope that TBD will inspire those of us who wrestle daily with the craft of fiction, and remind us that there are others out there, day and night, similarly hunched over their bureaus: toiling, honing, dispatching their words into the ether.
Happy reading!
Warmest regards,
The Editor
Jiksun Cheung is EIC of The Bureau Dispatch and writes speculative short fiction out of Hong Kong. His stories are published in Wigleaf, SmokeLong Quarterly, Atticus Review, The Molotov Cocktail, and elsewhere, and have received nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Wigleaf Top 50, Best of The Net, Best Microfiction, and The Shirley Jackson Award. He and his wife share their home with two boisterous toddlers and enough play dough to last a lifetime.
Find him on Twitter @JiksunCheung and jiksun.com.